The similarities between Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer are uncanny.
Palmer had been besotted by baseball since he was 9 and a serious baseball card collector from age 10, but never much of an athlete. The numbers in baseball spoke to him, and obeyed him in a way that the game itself never did. Like a junkball pitcher, he could make the numbers do as he commanded. Using paper and pencil, Palmer made lists of things. Every major leaguer who scored 100 runs in a season, or batted in 100, or got 200 hits. Then he began arranging all that information into tables and used a slide rule to calculate things. This was the shape his fandom took.
An uncommonly intelligent child, Palmer sailed through an expensive private school and Yale, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering while learning little that he didn’t already know. He went to work for the defense contractor Raytheon before joining MITRE—an offshoot of MIT that conducts research for various government agencies—in 1969. This gave him access to an extensive research library, and it was there that he found some early work by a man named Harold Hollis on scoring and win probability in baseball. It happened to align with Palmer’s own theories on the game.
Working at MITRE gave Palmer access to a computer, a rare and priceless thing at that time. Palmer wanted to test out Hollis’s formula, and set about computerizing his database of Major League statistics by working his way back from that year. Each player required a separate punch card that could be fed into the room-sized IBM mainframe computer. It took a few hundred cards to create the data for the 1969 season. “I said, ‘Gee, that didn’t take too long,’” Palmer told me. “So I thought I’d keep working on it.” He went all the way back to 1871. That probably gave him the nation’s most comprehensive statistical record of baseball’s history. Collecting it all had been an ordeal; complete stats were often hard to find and error-prone.
This took Palmer nearly two decades, during most of which he was the official statistician for the American League, on the stat crew of the New England Patriots, and building a basketball database as well. By the end, Palmer had punched out more than 100,000 cards. Then the floppy disk was invented and he threw all those punch cards, which filled 30 filing cabinet drawers, in the trash.